Snowy, Red-Trunked Trees Last February

Now that we are at the end of the year, we can look back at it and remind ourselves that we have come out of it reasonably well, and can look at 2012 with some hope. Nevertheless, 2011 felt like the year when, all of a sudden, we were pushed into *real* adulthood.

Without revealing any confidences, I think I can say that it has been a hard year for our close friends. Two of our friends lost their fathers, one quite suddenly and the other after a long, slow, and painful struggle. Friends have struggled with their health far more nobly than I have, and it has altogether been a hard year where a lot of plans and hopes have been turned upside down.

We went to see the Cherry Trees in bloom after I passed my Comps.

My own struggles (along with the fact that I was writing on a remarkably heavy schedule) are one of the reasons why this blog went so suddenly silent. I wasn’t sure I could take you along on another ride of “I’m having a health crisis” after the whole suspicious-thyroid-lumps-during-my-comps-preparation journey.

(Having an ultrasound guided biopsy of one’s thyroid, as someone petrified of needles, is a pretty good reason to want to wish a year a fairly hearty farewell.)

Back in June, I went to see my doctor– you know, the one who convinced me I probably had thyroid cancer, and then when I quoted statistics about thyroid cancer to her, said, “well, it’s always serious” despite knowing that I have a documented anxiety problem which she had treated and then just offered me sleeping pills–about some problems which I thought might be related to the thyroid.

“Well,” she said, “it’s probably endometriosis, and just so you know, endometriosis can come with inexplicable and infertility, not related to scarring…”

Also, I paid a lot of money for a haircut I just hated.

I spent most of the rest of the appointment feeling like the ground was falling from under me, and trying to conjure up the image in my mind of the two wonderful sons of a friend with endometriosis.

I went back to my carrel, and thought, “well, this frees up my career choices. If I can’t have children, I’ll be an academic. If I have to hurry to have children, I’ll be a mom and go back to a career later.”

That was liberating for about five minutes, before I went back to feeling like the bottom had fallen out of my heart.

I read all the Catholic infertility blogs. I gave up caffeine. I gave up wheat. I quit running. I had an ultrasound. There was a lump. At least nobody said “cancer” this time around. I cried a lot. I went to confession. At the mass afterwards I realized it was the feast of Saint Anne. That provided some comfort.

(Dear members of the clergy: if a young woman comes to you and says that she feels angry with God because she’s been told she has a high chance of not being able to have children, “you can always adopt,” while a factual answer and one which she should probably pray over accepting, it still isn’t a *good* response.)

And I felt guilty.

Late in the summer, I was having a lot of stomach pain, so I was sent back for another ultrasound. With one thing and another, I didn’t get around to getting it until mid-November, after I was back from Freiburg.

In Freiburg, we were housed in the residence where the Pope had stayed just a few weeks before.

And the result? It’s not Endometriosis. It’s something else which isn’t, you know, ideal, but… it’s not endometriosis. The weight of guilt, the weight the knowledge that worse pain was coming, and the weight of concerns about my ability to bear children are (for now) lifted. Apparently, my body is just really good at building benign lumps. All that stomach pain? Stress.

I cried some more.

Freiburg was lovely. Of course, all the days the conference ran it was foggy.

I’ve switched doctors.

My new doctor rolled her eyes when I told her about the other doctor’s comments. “You’re young. You’ll be fine.” Doctor’s prescription? Go get more exercise and drink more water.

Even without a child in the immediately visible future, this was, for me, what Tolkien would call a eucatastrophe. So I look at the advent candles at dinner, and I think of all the pain we and our friends have been through this past year, and I pray “come, Lord Jesus” with a greater desire than I have before, and I try to remember that my professor once said: “creation is a comedy, because it will end in joy.”

But nevertheless. 2011: Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.

(PS: You probably know I’m running a new blog. I’m reading a rabbi, trying to get people to teach me about Thomas Aquinas, and soon I’m going to start posting about gossip (as a concept). It’s… it’s more fun than it sounds, I promise.)

*Also, KB told me there was “too much beer drinking” in the first draft.

One of the best things that happened to me this summer was getting a summer cold, because it meant that I had a good excuse to sit around and do nothing but drink tea and read, and it went a long way to re-igniting a love of leisure reading, which had been rather cold after years of higher education.

While I had pretty much nothing to post about, blog-wise (or at least no energy to do so), I started to miss having a place to put up quotes and references to what I was reading.

So. Some women get piercings, I start a new blog.

True to say, I don’t know how long I will have concurrent blogs: I think this current one, weighed down by my younger, less mature self may slowly phase itself out (how could it phase itself out any more slowly than it is at the moment, you might well ask), unless I am hit by a sudden wave of inspiration in the coming months, while the new one may grow in new and unexpected ways. I had the same feeling for the last six months of  the online journal I kept in undergrad: it started to feel as if it no longer fit, and I needed a fresh start. Now that I’m four years older, I look back at the “new” self of 2007-2008 and realize how much more confident I am in myself,* how much less I want to be critical and sarcastic and full of complaints. I’m both more convinced by my beliefs, and less convinced by my capability to argue about some of them, and I want to put myself forward less, as if such a thing were possible on a weblog.

So, a project for Advent quiet: Into Deep Water.** The first quote is Wendell Berry, and I hope my more technocratic friends can forgive me.

____

* Anyone who knows what great confidence problems I have will find this truly remarkable.

** I’m not saying that I think I’m so “deep”– this is taken from the motto I adopted for 2011***, from Luke 5:4, “Duc in altum, et laxate retia vestra in capturam.”

*** If you say that your goal for the new year is to adopt “duc in altum” as your motto for your faith, and then forget about it… God will not forget, and he will teach you to trust him. This is my lesson, two health scares later. (I’m still trying to learn the trust– it looks like “duc in altum” will be my theme for 2012 as well.)

However, I was feeling overwhelmed this morning, so a little look at how much less I have to do (and how many things have been down-graded in concern after a little hard work) is a reassuring event.

Seven things I’ve learned about myself from writing quite a bit in a short time (and which I should remember as I dive into writing even MORE in a short time):

1) I need the first 45 minutes of each day’s working time to be mindless writing towards any goal. These don’t need real footnotes or clear prose, but they do just need to be written. When enough of these sessions are written, I can string them together and edit.
2) I work best when this time is fairly early (for a Grad Student). 8:00 am with a nice cup of tea is perfect.
3) To achieve these writing goals, I need to turn off the internet. I use Freedom to control my morning writing session.
4) My husband is an excellent editor.
5) The more I read, the more easily I write. I think my ravenous devouring of pleasure reading is helping my brain recover from too many years of not reading much more than homework assignments and the internet.
6) I enjoy my time off more if I can look to something I have actually done over the day. Old news for people in more conventional jobs, perhaps, but for Grad Students who set their own goals and for whom the temptation to procrastinate looms large, it’s remarkable to feel like the evening is actually a time to relax.
7) Repeated re-working of a piece of writing is not something to be feared.

I even remember my password.

I had a lovely summer, thank you for asking. It was full of days spent at home, quilting and knitting and working my way through cookbooks from the public library.

Some things were difficult (I’m ready for 2011 to be over), but there was a lot of this sort of thing:

and a little of this…

and this:

I attended two friends’ weddings and cried both times.

I remembered that I used to like to read for fun, and I’ve been tearing through books at what I think is a remarkable rate.

I didn’t have much interest in writing, and it was nice to take the time off, although I felt bad for not explaining it. I thought I’d come back when the school year was back and I needed more space to be myself, but to tell the truth, I’m not sure how that will work out.

You see, between papers, proposals, and applications, I’m writing the equivalent of a thesis chapter…before mid-October. While I have a TAship. And finish up two summer RAships.

My “in progress” file on my computer looks like this, with urgency coded from red to green (blue means I’m waiting for other people to do something).

So, you see, I can’t really promise you anything in the way of interesting writing. Complaining, yes– but those aren’t really the same thing.

The light through the trees of “our forest” (that is, the ravine behind our apartment) is pretty…

and a newly deep-cleaned and decluttered kitchen made me very, very happy…

And I, myself, am pretty funny, but my concerns are real. I actually hesitated about writing about this, since a small part of me feels like it makes me look so unprofessional– but I suppose most of the graduate school friends I have know that I have been talking about this all the time, so what else do I have to lose?

This is a floor plan of our apartment. We do not want to move (nor can we really afford to). (I spent an obsessive Victoria Day working on this on floorplanner.com). Recently, my husband has been banging around the apartment like a teenager with a growth spurt. Despite how carefully I have measured, stuff is tight and crowded around here.

We also can’t afford to give up our home office– but where (granted that there is not yet a baby in sight*) do we fit all the baby stuff? A bassinet fits right next to mama…

… but what do you do when the baby’s too big? What about changing? Etc.

(If you’ve guessed by now that this isn’t as much about planning ahead as it is about conflicted emotions over professional and maternal roles, my own mother’s publicly shared experience, conflicting role models, opposing familial views, living in a neighborhood flooded with nannies pushing $1000 strollers*, and procrastination, you are very wise.)

I suppose this is too much text and too much of a cry for help to really be a {pretty, happy, funny, real} link-along post, but I can’t really think of a better link-along for wisdom from more experienced women. I’m an only child, the baby of both extended families, and hardly knew any babies growing up. I’m so lost!

* I know this because I’ve been on Amazon looking at crib sizes.

Even though we have no car, we buy 10 kilo (22 pound) bags of flour.

No, we aren’t feeding hordes (except for hordes of fellow grad students)– we don’t have any children yet, but we don’t buy any baked goods unless they are really, really worth it (and they rarely are). For the amount of baking we do, it’s much cheaper to buy flour in bulk. A great deal of bulk.

This morning, we got home from the grocery store to discover a rip in our brand-new bag of flour, and then we had a disagreement on how to proceed, breaking down along the lines of city girl fastidiousness and country boy frugality.

I, internally: “Oh dear, I guess we now have to go, at last, to find an airtight container large enough to hold this much flour so that we don’t have unsealed bags of it lying around in the humid Toronto summer.”

He (aloud): “We have a solution for this.”

I’m registered for a 5k.

A long, long time ago (read: Jr. High), I ran cross-country. Not very well, and not very…attentively.

Admittedly, the views for running don't get much better.

A long time ago (read: High School), my husband ran cross-country. Pretty well.

My husband is much, much better at measuring distances than I am. He also thinks I need a concrete goal to encourage me to add more exercise to my life, and since I’m not climbing back into a leotard and ballet shoes (hah!) anytime soon, running is it.

Speaking of ballet: a swan.

I came home from my first serious walk/run yesterday feeling really good about myself and plopped down at Map My Run to figure out how many kilometers I had covered in the set time.

The answer: not as many as I thought.

Indeed, after some futzing around on the computer, I have determined that I was considerably underestimating five kilometers in my mind.

KB keeps trying to tell me how proud I will be of myself when I finish, but for my part, I am doing what I do any time I pick up my exercise routine, and that is complaining to all and sundry about how much I hurt.

Including to you.

Does this look like a happy bride?

One of my friends says that she thinks I’m just overwhelmed by emotion, but that’s not it. It’s the expression of a bride who is paralyzingly shy. “My flowers will save me!”

You might not be able to tell, and I’d like to say that it is because I have good ways of dealing with it– I ask people how they’re doing, I’ve just learned tricks for turning the conversation so that others are talking– but no. The way I deal with it is by performing– particularly, trying to make other people laugh– in order to be accepted and appreciated.

This was a trick I learned in High School. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t quite work, and I die a slow death of embarrassment. Like when twice as many people as expected showed up at the pub to celebrate my exam pass, or on my wedding day.

I spent a lot of time at my wedding telling other women that I liked their dresses, to try to get the attention off of mine.

(This is also why I am bad at getting my hair cut. Please don’t talk to me!)

I wonder where I could have acquired this personality trait?

Thanks, Dad.

I’ve had these shoes since 2005, but I never really knew what to wear them with.

Until I had a navy-blue pantsuit I was too lazy to hem.

I got up at 6:45, I said Morning Prayer off my iPod. I checked facebook, and discovered the following instructions from my Godmother:

Some family questions for you:
Q: What’s the spirit of the exam? A: Kill!
Q: What’s the battle cry? A: No prisoners!

(You should have KB ask the questions in an intense voice, then you give the answers. Repeat as necessary. This would approximate my conversation with my father the morning of every stressful event of my academic life….)

KB made coffee, bacon, and eggs while I had a hot shower. I caught the subway into campus, reviewing note-cards and listening to required pre-exam music on the way in [The Hold Steady, "Separation Sunday"]. I felt confident in my fancy shoes. I arrived at the same time as one of my examiners, and she and I chatted while everyone else arrived, with their coffee and tea.

The exam went. When I was done with (what would turn out to be) the last question, one of my co-advisers said, “excellent.” Then they kicked me out of the room.

It was a short wait. My primary adviser was smiling when he called me in.

Not five minutes after, my Middle Welsh professor came over and said, “congratulations! I heard you were excellent.” I think I stared at him open mouthed, because he continued, “guess who I had a chance to talk to in the past thirty seconds.”

Now all I have to do is write a dissertation. I don’t know– after one of our pre-exam meetings, one of my committee members told me that he thought I had matured greatly as a scholar over the past year. He doesn’t know the half of it, really. Had it been a past year, I’d have said to myself, “okay! time to go do something else all summer.” (Perhaps this is because I had to cram all my wedding planning into the last two summers, and then I was a newlywed. With a KitchenAid to play with.)

Instead, on Saturday morning I was casually writing out a brainstorming list for potential articles to get out of my exam reading, and perusing the advice on ToDo:Dissertation.

It’s strange; I had expected this to go terribly, and thus to have an “out”– or at least an excuse to just white-knuckle through the rest of the degree and then do something else. But my “out” is gone, and what’s more, I don’t want the “out” as much as I did.

Although you could always ask me again in September, when my thesis proposal is due.

Cherry trees in the distance, about to bloom, seen on a post-exam walk (after changing shoes!)

I spent Saturday evening at a going-away party for a fellow student where the conversation turned to High School, and I (as one does) mentioned my unhappiness with my High School experience. There were, however, two things I loved when I left:

1) the outdoors

2) the theatre, particularly play-wrighting.

The second item perhaps requires a post of its own, but suffice to say that all my early influences from the Catholic Church were through the theatre, whether seeing these plays performed in the theatre space of which my mother was the executive director, or researching St. Teresa of Avila because I hadn’t much liked a book I’d read about her, but thought I could work her into a play… all these things were immensely important.

I may, now, as an academic, feel somewhat more akin to Benedict (and I actually find him easier to read). However, through stories about him, John Paul II– a hiking, kyaking, play-wrighting Pope– he, as Betty Beguiles says, met me where I was, and the fact that he had shared my passions made the movement to a church he led a little easier.

Blessed John Paul II, pray for us writers!